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Members of the Ohio Senate Public Utilities Committee heard testimony this week on two bills that would roll back Ohio’s renewable energy and energy efficiency standards. Backed by fossil-fuel funded special interest groups and their political allies, these proposals would undermine Ohio’s emerging clean energy industries and make the state even more dependent on coal and natural gas.

ALEC, the Heartland Institute, and the Beacon Hill Institute all come to the table with dubious records of spreading disinformation to sow doubt about the scientific evidence on climate change and the consequences of tobacco use. Each has received funding from fossil fuel and tobacco interests.

So far, their campaign to roll back RES policies across the country has failed. Policymakers in states like Kansas and North Carolina exhibited sound judgment in rejecting the disinformation and repeal attempts. Likewise, Ohioans should be skeptical of claims about the Buckeye State’s clean energy policies coming from these groups, and the politicians who repeat them.

Senate Bill 34: Repeal Ohio’s Renewable Electricity Standard?

Leading off at the latest Senate Public Utilities Committee hearing was Senate Bill 34. Introduced by Sen. Jordan (R–Ostrander), this bill would repeal Ohio’s requirement that 12.5 percent of the state’s power supply come from renewable energy by 2025. It is a retread version of the RES repeal bill Sen. Jordan first introduced in 2011, which was hailed by ALEC, but ultimately tabled by the Committee.

In his rhetoric against the RES, Sen. Jordan routinely cites a Beacon Hill Institute economic analysis that ALEC distributed to Ohio lawmakers. But the Beacon Hill Institute’s Ohio RES study is deeply flawed in many ways, including that it exaggerates the costs of renewable energy technologies and ignores the benefits of wind and solar power. The study even makes the incredulous claim that variable wind power “could actually increase pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.”

The opposite conclusion was reached in a recent analysis by an economist at the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO), the agency responsible for overseeing the RES. That study found Ohioans are already benefiting from renewable energy through downward pressure on wholesale electricity prices and reduced emissions. PUCO’s modeling also showed that the more frequent ramping up and down of fossil-fuel plants to accommodate renewable energy resources did not materially affect overall emissions reductions.

Unfortunately, the Beacon Hill Institute deliberately ignores real world evidence about the innovations and tools that make it more efficient and cost-effective to ramp up renewable energy, while maintaining a reliable and cleaner power system. Instead, they effectively cut and paste the same false claim in study after study, spreading misinformation about the environmental benefits of renewable energy.

It is telling that the Beacon Hill Institute grounds its claim in the questionable findings of a single Colorado-specific report from 2010, also funded by fossil fuel interests. Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest utility with extensive experience generating and integrating wind power, promptly debunked the study’s findings. And more recently, a National Renewable Energy Laboratory study on Colorado and other Western states found that any increase in fossil-fuel power plant emissions to accommodate renewable energy is small, and more than offset by overall reductions in carbon emissions and other air pollutants.

In explaining his change of position—Sen. Seitz voted for the original clean energy standards in 2008, along with nearly every member of the Ohio House and Senate—and current rollback attempt, Senator Seitz argues that “[i]n 2008, we projected that there would be a steady increase in electricity demand. That has not happened.”

That’s true, but using electricity more efficiently has always been a central goal of the Ohio’s clean energy law, which requires utilities to achieve cumulative energy savings of 22 percent by the end of 2025. In fact, Ohio’s four regulated utilities achieved nearly 3.1 million MWh of savings through energy efficiency from 2009 to 2011, as PUCO Chairman Todd Snitchler told Sen. Seitz’s committee in March. The fact that the energy efficiency standard is working effectively seems like a spurious reason to be against it.

Sen. Seitz deserves credit for accurately acknowledging that the costs for wind and solar power have declined in recent years. But he also contends that wind and solar “fuels remain far more costly” than “fuel generated from conventional sources, and uncompetitive with natural gas.” In reality, strong evidence shows thatwind and solar can protect consumers against fossil fuel price volatility. Once built, the “fuel” to power wind turbines and solar panels is free; whereas natural gas and coal prices are subject to dramatic swings. In fact, coal and natural gas prices projected to increase by 59 and 119 percent, respectively, in the wholesale electricity market serving Ohio.

Periodic review of any policy makes good sense. But such reviews need to be based on sound and transparent analysis from credible sources, not ideological attacks and disinformation from special interest groups funded by the very industry that stands to benefit from dismantling the policy.

A rigorous review of Ohio’s renewable energy and energy efficiency standards would find that these policies have been effective, affordable and are delivering benefits to consumers and the environment. They should be strengthened—not repealed or diluted.

A recent survey shows that a majority of Ohioans supports requiring utilities to provide 20 percent their electricity from renewable energy (well above the current 12.5 percent requirement). That would be a good step forward. First, let’s make sure Ohio does not become the first state to choose the fossil fuel industry’s fiction over clean energy facts.

That was a lot of fact checking to avoid the 900 pound gorilla in the renewable energy room. Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) proponents are obsessed over “climate change.” So why not consider the impact that state RPS programs are having on the economic climate? That’s where you’ll discover the real climate change taking place.

California is the country’s ‘green energy’ laboratory. They have enacted the most ambitious RPS program in the nation by a long shot. Residential electricity rates increased 5.7% year-to-date 2013 vs. the same period in 2012. In the rest of the nation outside California, residential rates increased by only 1.6%. In 2012, the state’s residential electricity rates increased 5.2% over the year earlier. For the rest of the nation outside California, the increase was less than 1%. California’s RPS program, far more aggressive than the rest of the other 28 states, is causing electricity and other energy rates to climb far faster than in other states. This is driving businesses, jobs and taxpayers out of the state at record rates. Meanwhile, new entrants to the state’s population have far lower median incomes and 70% of them in the past 10 years have been enrolled in means-tested public assistance programs and pay no state income taxes. This is the ‘green energy’ future being prototyped on the Left Coast.

What impact are RPS programs having on unemployment in the states where they have been enacted? In 2008, before most RPS programs had achieved a large degree of penetration in the 29 states, the weighted average unemployment rate between the group of 29 RPS states was identical to the average unemployment rate in the group of 21 non-RPS states. But after nearly 5 years of steadily higher electricity prices in RPS states, the average electricity rate in RPS states is now 24% higher than the average for non-RPS states. As a result, there is now a permanent 0.7% increase in the headline population-weighted unemployment rate between RPS states vs. those that have chosen not to enact these costly measures. Workers and employers are voting with their feet.

If ‘green energy’ enthusiasts want to believe that RPS measures that typically require 10-15% of electricity to be produced from renewable sources that have been enacted in states that account for about 72% of the U.S. population will have a consequential impact on the future of the planet’s climate, that is their business. But consider this: The U.S. accounted for less than 17% of the global total of greenhouse gas emissions in 2011 and will produce less than 14% by 2030. And electricity only accounts for about 15% of total primary energy. So ‘green energy’ enthusiasts must content themselves believing that an average 12.5% RPS emission curtailment on 15% of primary energy for 73% of the population in a nation that accounts for only 17% of global emissions — in other words a total reduction of maybe 0.22% in global emissions — will have a measureable impact on the course of future climate events.

Back here on planet Earth, we are grappling with a nation where more than 49 million households are receiving one or more forms of means-tested public assistance, where only one out of eleven working-age adult entrants to the population finds their way into the civilian workforce, where the sustained rate of real economic growth is the lowest in post-War history, where median household income is lower today than it was in 1996, where the labor force participation rate is lower than anytime back to 1983, where more than 81% of BLS Household Survey job creation since 2009 has been for part-time work, where nearly 75% of BLS Payroll jobs created outside of the ‘brown energy’ state of Texas since 2009 have been in the Leisure & Hospitality industry whose average weekly wage rate is below 43% of the national average, etc. This is not fertile ground to be planting the seeds for higher energy prices.

Meanwhile, amidst the economic wreckage, ‘green energy’ enthusiasts are fighting tooth-and-nail to maintain and expand these expensive programs that are destroying economic livelihoods but are having no material impact on the course of future climate events. Only willful self-delusion permits ‘green energy’ proponents to advance their arguments for maintaining these ruinously expensive, inconsequentially beneficial programs.